After creating the initial Base environments That overall worked very well I wanted to make sure that these felt realistic to a real life apartment but also the correct size for a player to want to explore and see different areas of the apartments.
One of the problems could be making the environments a lot smaller so that they could perhaps more resemble an apartment that would be realistic for someone to have lived in but to also make it large enough to warrant the need for exploration and movement for gameplay.
Updates and Changes to the Layout
Initially when we were trying to create an apartment for our experience we found a really great low Polly asset pack which contained everything you would need to create a household setting. The pack consisted of doors, walls, floors and other interior items from Kitchenware to Living area but we needed to think more logistically about how we were going to create this apartment through time.
Some of the wall layouts were adjusted to change some of the general room sizes and layouts because before it was suggested after talking to Lin and Iris that the apartment might be a bit too large in scale. The overall layout of the apartment was then slightly shrunk down further which I think worked great overall.
Four XR Rigs
After working on the general layouts of the apartment I then tried adding four different XR rigs into the environments. This was quite simple in practice so i just created an XR rig and scaled it accordingly to the environment and this was then duplicated and placed into the other three environments so each one was its own standalone level. I then viewed each environment using the Virtual reality headset and overall everything seemed to work well and viewed fine other than of course not having any official lighting or textures but for initial tests this works well.
Environments Teleportation
One of the initial ideas and concepts for this experience that was shown to us by Herman was having all of the different apartments present in one scene. This concept would allow the player to seamlessly transition into the different Virtual apartments by turning on and off different XR rigs which the player wouldn’t notice the changes in levels.
The main concept for our experience is to change the time period or level using medicines as a trigger but for the first research iterations we will just have it based on the player pressing a trigger or another button which will trigger a random change.
Exporting Environment Packages
Now that the environment layout and design is mostly finished We now needed to make sure that we could continue to work on this project individually without needing to constantly update and communicate any changes or updates etc. So I felt that the easiest way to do this was by exporting the environment/apartment as a prefab package so that lin and Iris could work and populate their environments with the assigned time periods that we had chosen.
I had chosen to work on the 90s layout, Lin had chosen to work on the 80s Layout while Iris chose to work on the future environment. I didn’t mind creating the modern day layout for the tests since not much research would be required since we currently know what the current furnishings of an apartment are like! The research and imagery that we collected from the museum of the home will also be extremely helpful for this next stage and process for the project.